I would like to field another question to members of the forum. Forum threads on eye piece selection have been recently posted and in the past. The Questar comes with the Brandon eye pieces that offer a limited field of view, but from what I have read, they offer better contrast color and central to edge sharpness then most other eye pieces. No other eye piece in this regard will be better. You get the best possible image an eye piece will deliver in a small package, and accept the narrower field of view. The apparent field of view can be captured at once.

Televue has an adapter to use their eyepieces that also allow the finder to work. Their plossls will work, are cheaper, offer a slightly wider view, but there is some lateral colour, and their image may be softer than the Brandons.

Televue recommends their 19 mm Panoptic and 9 mm Nagler for their Brandon replacement. You get a much wider field of view both true and apparent. I have never used these, and from my reading it seems that they can be more difficult to look through as you have to tilt your head around to chase the visual edges on the side of the wide field of view, along with kidney bean shadows on the other side. You cannot it seems capture the entire apparent field of view at once. There is also some pincushion distortion. You will also see the edge of the telescope tube through the view finder. I am not sure I see the merit in such a wide field of view in a 9 mm eyepiece that will probably be used for a limited central target like a double star or planet. It may have some merit on the moon.

I also wonder if these wide field eyepieces look cartoonishly large sitting on the Questar?

I have a set of Brandons and they are great. I also use a 10mm Ethos and a 14mm Nikon NAV for wide fields. I think they're all very sharp. It depends what mood you're in. I alternate which makes my eyes feel better. I actually have a diagonal in the axial port so I have 2 ep's ready to go.

Last night, I took out my Questar 3.5 with a 16mm Brandon eyepiece. In the high-power mode, with the Barlow lens flipped in, the four main moons plus Jupiter occupied pretty much the whole field of view. I didn't try my 12mm Brandon. It would have provided a larger view of Jupiter, but probably wouldn't have shown all five objects at the same time.

In my Questar 7 I use a TV 55 mm Plossl for the low end, a 27 mm Panoptic for the "sweet spot". Both of these offer exceptional views!

Above that, I've used TV Plossls, Radians... all with good results, but consider the Brandon to be a perfect mid-high power match for the scope. When I really want to see something; the Brandons tend to reveal it best. It seems the two were made for each other.

Was it this one, Mike? (Televue eyepieces only; F is the significant column and you'd need to cross-reference with Televue eyepieces in that other list to figure out which ones from my post would work OK):-

Televue recommends their 19 mm Panoptic and 9 mm Nagler for their Brandon replacement. You get a much wider field of view both true and apparent. I have never used these, and from my reading it seems that they can be more difficult to look through as you have to tilt your head around to chase the visual edges on the side of the wide field of view.

I also wonder if these wide field eyepieces look cartoonishly large sitting on the Questar?

I have some experience trying Tele Vue eyepieces with a 3.5-inch Questar. The 19mm has several nice features which is why I think Tele Vue highly recommends it with the Q. First, it is one on the few non-Brandon eyepieces that works (without the need for any special adapters) with Questar's Finder mode. Second, it provides just as large of a true field at 67x as the 24mm Brandon does at 53x and many people prefer eyepieces which have wider fields of view. Third, if you use it with the Questar's 1.6x Barlow it gives you 108x which is just about what a 12mm Brandon would give you except that the Panoptic has better eye relief and an appreciably bigger field.

I'm not sure why Tele Vue especially recommends the 9mm Nagler with the Questar, the 13mm & 11mm T6 Naglers also work just as well with it but at lowers powers but with larger true fields.

From a size, weight & appearance perspective I don't think either the 24mm Pan, 19mm Pan, 13-11-9-7mm T6 Naglers of the 8mm - 18mm Radian eyepieces look took large or cartoonish in the scope. To be sure, large TV eyepieces like the 13mm Ethos do.

On the difficulty of observing with TV wide field eyepieces. I don't find the 19mm Pan to be any trouble at all and have no problems with needing to move my eye all around and have to keep looking off to the side. With the Nagler eyepieces and their larger apparent fields it is sometimes necessary to look off to the sides to see everthing of interest. However, most of the time I just look and in the central area and do bother with the sides because I often don't need to based what type of object I'm observing with.

I didn't go out an put assemble a large set of Tele Vue eyepieces to use with the Q, I already had a number of them that I used with my other scope. I don't have a motor drive to use with my Q so there are times when I really appreciate having the wider field of view that the TV eyepieces provide versus the Brandons.

Wonder if an aus-jena 4mm would be a good buy for a Questar? or for that matter, for any telescope.

Not for a Questar.

In other scopes? I had an original Zeiss Abbe 4mm. Not my favorite eyepiece. The Zeiss orthos are getting very nice from 6mm up, with the sweet spot in the 10 and 12.5mm. The longer focal lengths are superb too, but not your regular high-mag eyepieces unless you have a C14 or the likes.

A couple of years ago I had a set (16-10-6-4mm) ZAO IIs. The 16mm & 10mm worked great with my 3.5-inch Questar at 80x & 128x respectively. With the 6mm on the other hand (at 213x) the views were usually not steady enough (due to atmospheric turbulence) to warrant using it. I never even tried using the 4mm with it knowing the very high power it would yield (i.e., 320x) would not work well. I aslo didn't care very much for the 4mm Ortho because of its very short eye relief although I was very fond of the 10mm & 16mm ZAOs. I had the set for about 18 months and then ended up selling it for about 15% more than I paid for it.

While they were nice I didn't think that they were that much better than the Brandon and Tele Vue eyepieces I also had to warrant keeping almost 3K invested in that ZAO II set.